Welcome to AMD Opteron™ Solutions, an e-newsletter designed to offer you valuable information on current products, partnerships, promotions and much more from AMD that may help you make well-informed purchasing decisions. Comments, suggestions, or story ideas? Let us hear from you.

New Sun Fire Servers and Sun Java Workstations Offer You High-Performance Solutions for Demanding Enterprise Applications

Sun delivers the fastest AMD Opteron processor-based product line available with leading price/performance. The recently introduced Sun Fire V40z server, Sun Java Workstation W1100z and Sun Java Workstation W2100z are setting landspeed records in real world and industry-standard benchmarks.

“Our newest systems based on the AMD Opteron processor deliver the total system solution that none of our competitors can match – unparalleled choice of operating systems including Solaris x86 OS, high-performance hardware, and the Sun Java Enterprise System software stack,” said John Fowler, executive vice president of Sun's Network Systems Group.

Sun Fire V40z recently proved to be the best performing four-processor secure Web server on the market, outperforming a comparable server configured with Xeon MP processors by 76 percent, according to a SPECweb99_SSL benchmark (1).

The Sun Java Workstation W1100z and Sun Java Workstation W2100z achieved up to 61 percent faster performance running the Solaris x86 OS, compared to the Dell 650 Precision Xeon processor-based workstation running Red Hat Linux, according to the BLAST benchmark (2). These new workstations also outperformed all other one- and two-processor Xeon and AMD Opteron processor-based systems on floating point operations based on the SPEC CPU2000 benchmark (3).

The Sun Java Workstation W1100z demonstrated best overall performance running the OCUS (Olaf Corten's Utilities) benchmark V4 for PTC Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 2.0, one of the world's most prominently used mechanical computer aided design applications (4).

Learn more about Sun Fire V40z, Sun Java Workstation W1100z and Sun Java Workstation W2100z solutions from Sun now>>>

New Web-based Logo Program Designed for You – Let Your Customers Know Your Website is Flexible, Powerful and Reliable Day In and Day Out

Your business demands a server processor that’s flexible, powerful and reliable enough to deliver a great website experience for your customers now and in the future, so you chose a solution based on the
AMD Opteron processor with Direct Connect Architecture. AMD Opteron processors behind your website help communicate your message, help sell your products, and represent you well each time visitors explore your website.

We invite you to take advantage of a new Web-based logo program designed to help educate and inform your customers that websites like yours, powered by
AMD Opteron processors, help deliver more of the things they love about the Web — like smooth downloads, speedy page loads, dynamic Flash elements, and streaming media that runs without a hitch.

We appreciate your interest in the Powered by AMD Opteron Processor Online Logo program. And more importantly, thank you for powering your website with the world’s first 32-bit and 64-bit processor compatible with the industry-standard x86 architecture -- the AMD Opteron processor with Direct Connect Architecture.

To access the downloadable logo files for use on your website, complete our short program registration today>>>

Sun Fire V20z Servers Surpass the Competition

Microsoft’s Treasury Experiences Performance Boost With Financial Risk Management Applications after Switching to the AMD Opteron Processor

Microsoft Treasury is in charge of managing the financial assets and the foreign currency exposure of the world’s most successful software company. Microsoft Treasury assets total more than $60 billion dollars and are invested in a wide range of fixed income and equity assets. Due to the continuing success of Microsoft and the resulting growth of assets managed by the treasury, the task to measure and analyze the risks associated with the treasury’s global investment strategy has become a highly formalized and complex process. Treasury managers rely on sophisticated applications to estimate the financial risk associated with factors such as foreign exchange, equity and fixed income.

The Barra TotalRisk System applications used by Microsoft Treasury to manage risk for its financial portfolio are based on “Monte Carlo” techniques, which are statistical simulation methods used to do complex numerical computations. The combination of the size and global investment strategy of Microsoft Treasury, and the sophistication of the Barra applications used to process the innumerable risk factors, requires high-performance computing capability.

"Securing greater memory utilization for our Barra 32-bit application by switching to AMD Opteron processor-based systems and Microsoft's public Beta version of Windows Server 2003, Enterprise Edition for 64-bit Extended Systems gave us performance gains without having to recompile a single line of code," says Max Giolitti, Risk Manager for Microsoft Treasury.

Read more about Microsoft’s Treasury performance boost with financial Risk Management Applications>>>

The HyperTransport™ Consortium is providing a free "How to Design With HyperTransport Technology" technical seminar on September 22, 2004 at 1:00pm PSD.

In conjunction with Consortium member Mindshare, Inc., the non-profit HyperTransport Consortium is hosting a free one-hour technical seminar on "How to Design With HyperTransport Technology." This brief but informative seminar will show you how to apply the industry's lowest latency chip-to-chip interconnect technology in your next design. HyperTransport technology is the foundation of AMD's AMD64 technology with Direct Connect Architecture that delivers the highest performance processor architecture in the industry. The seminar will illustrate how you can take advantage of the 22.4 Gigabyte/second bandwidth, low-latency, scalability and extensibility of the royalty-free HyperTransport interconnect technology.

The seminar is presented by Mindshare, Inc., one of the industry's foremost technology educators. Mindshare presents innovative courses, produces technology books and delivers online seminars on a wide array of leading edge technologies.

Register for "How to Design With HyperTransport Technology"
here>>>

Optimizing Your C/C++ Applications, Part 1

1 SPEC and the benchmark names SPEC CPU2000 and SPECfp are registered trademarks of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. For the latest benchmark results visit http://www.spec.org. PathScale develops software and hardware solutions that enable Linux clusters to achieve new levels of performance and efficiency. or more details, visit http://pathscale.com/

2 The BLAST benchmark, which models a BioInformatics Application performing pattern matching for nucleotides and amino acids, was provided by the National Center for Biotechnology Information. The Sun Java Workstation W1100z with an AMD Opteron processor Model 150 running Solaris 10 operating system, achieved up to 61 percent better performance than Dell 650 workstation with one 3.2 GHz Xeon processor running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0. More information on the BLAST 2.2.9 benchmark can be found at http://www.ncbi.nih.gov/blast.

3 The Sun Java Workstation W1100z achieved a SPECfp2000 result of 1787. The Sun Java Workstation W2100z achieved a SPECfp_rate2000 result of 39.6. SPEC, SPEC CPU2000 and SPECfp are the registered trademarks of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. Competitive benchmark results stated above reflect results published on www.spec.org as of 07/26/04. For the latest SPEC CPU2000 benchmark results, visit http://www.spec.org/cpu2000/results/. The result was obtained using compilers from Pathscale, Inc. and The Portland Group.

4 The Sun Java Workstation W1100z and Sun Java Workstation W2100z outperform all benchmarks results published at the OCUS Benchmark, http://www.proesite.com as of 7/23/04. The Sun Java Workstation W2100z was powered by two AMD Opteron processors Model 250, 4 GB of memory and an FX 3000 framebuffer. The Sun Java Workstation W1100Z was powered by an AMD Opteron processor Model 150, 4 GB of memory and a FX 500 framebuffer. Both Sun workstations were running the OCUS V4 benchmark with PTC Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire under 32-bit RHEL 3.0 Update 1. Parametric Technology Corporation products and services mentioned here in are trademarks or registered trademarks of Parametric Technology Corporation.

5 As of 8/8/04. The Sun Fire V20z server, equipped with two AMD Opteron processors Model 250, 128 KB L1 cache, 1MB L2 cache, 16 GB main memory, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 (64-bit), Oracle 9i, SAP 4.70 (32-bit), has achieved the best 2-tier SAP SD Standard Application Benchmark result of 456 SAP SD benchmark users with 1.95 seconds average dialog response time and measured throughput of 137,000 dialog steps per hour (or 45,670 fully processed line items per hour). The benchmark fully complies with the SAP Benchmark Council regulations and have been audited and certified by SAP AG (certification # 2004047). SAP, R/3, mySAP, and other SAP products and services mentioned herein are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP AG in Germany and several other countries. For the latest results, see: http://www.sap.com/benchmark/ SPEC™ and the benchmark names SPEC CPU2000, SPECfp, SPECweb99_SSL™, SPECjbb200™ and SPECjAppServer2002™ are registered trademarks of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. For the latest benchmark results visit http://www.spec.org.

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